ark@alice.UUCP (Andrew Koenig) (06/10/85)
re: reliability, service, etc. I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that two months after I got my CDP-101, it developed a HIGHLY intermittent servo failure of a sort that would have damaged my discs (!) if left unchecked. The symptom was that the music would stop abruptly and the disc would start spinning faster and faster and faster (you could hear the thing revving up). Then the clamp would let go and the disc would go banging around the inside of the compartment. The second bad news was that during six weeks of waiting and testing, Sony was unable to reproduce the problem, period. The good news was that they replaced the entire machine rather than let me go away unhappy. On that basis alone I would recommend Sony. If you think the oversampling issue is important (I don't), be aware that Sony's latest machines use 2x oversampling and a combination of analog and digital filtering that purports to give flatter frequency response and fewer phase aberrations than any previous systems. More important (to me), they claim to be able to locate any spot on the disc in less than one second. If you can spare a trip to Springfield, you might try Disco Electronics, which sells Sony CD machines at a steep discount. Call first to ensure they have what you want in stock. Be prepared to pay cash.